You must have rootexplorer for this to work.First root with one click root then open rootexplorer then go to system/app in there is all the system apk files
that came with your phone hit menu then select all. Copy and paste to a new folder on your sdcard done. You must do this so if an over the air update comes out and you deleted any of those apk files the update will not work.as for deleting bloat not sure what that does to the Bionic good or bad wont find out tell Thursday morning so delete at your own risk. :blackdroid:

Good advice on backing up the system files, but I think it should be mentioned that deleting anything will be very risky. At most I would recommend renaming apk's that you want to not have load at boot. And as much as this will likly fall on deaf ears, I would highly recommend that folks get adb up and running in good fashion on their computer system while the phone's operating system is completely intact. Then take the copy of the files they get with your method, and copy them to their PC. There have been more than a few softbricks of the D3 by folks who either did not understand what they were doing, or just got too crazy with perceived bloat. Having adb functioning up front could help insure recovery from a soft brick. The D3 folks have had a couple of weeks to sort out bloat removal, and the threads there really should be read by anyone who is going to root the Bionic. But I am sure this subforum is gonna fill up with redundancy, good and bad from the D3 subforum :blink:.

Yes, that is the safest way at this point. But there are lots of folks who will not read any of this and/or who are used to doing things on a phone with a recovery, so we are trying to make sure enough warnings get out. heck there is at least one guy with a D3 who is making changes to the xml files and some modding the boot file, and one person asking about metamorph. Some folks living VERY LARGE.

I think that is it for now. I am not sure if there is a system dump out there anywhere to compare things to. I saw your question in the other two threads, and right now no one knows for sure what any OTA will need to update your phone properly. We also do not know the timing of any update at this point. Generally there is some kind of update after new phones are out for a while, but with the popularity of this phone with some of the developers that I know of, we may have more alternatives than say the folks with the D3. By this I mean that it appears folks may be working on getting something beyond root for the Bionic which could mean being able to work around the locked bootloader and issues of needing a "stock" system to get things in an update.

I'm coming from an OG Droid, so I haven't had to root/unroot in over a year. There also wasn't all of this bloatware on that phone. I was unaware that it would cause OTA update issues by uninstalling "non critical" bloat apps.

I'm downloading the system dump of all the apps. I'm assuming I need the odexed version to mirror how the phone was stock. What do I do with the system dump?

I'll have to try this when I get home from work. Thanks for your help!

I am a bit rusty as well with putting back stock stuff on an ox'd system. I guess the first thing I would do since it sounds as if you may not have written down everything you removed is to do a side by side comparison and make a list.

As to getting them back, I know for sure that it would be safest to adb push the stuff to system, and get the permissions correct. You might be able to install the apks, but not sure on that. You can also try just copying them back in place with what ever root file manager you used to remove them, and set the correct permissions. But I will caveat that with again not having done this in a while, you do need to be careful replacing files in the system, while it is running. I am sure some of the less inocuous apps would be ok, but you need to be careful if you hammered away at more of the integrated system apps. There have been a few folks in the D3 forum who have done this, if you do not get additional info here, perhaps IM one of them to see if they can help. I just tend to be very careful right now, as soft bricks are pretty easy to do.

Actually if it were me, I might consider doing nothing, as any OTA does not appear to be immenant, and by the time the first OTA does roll out, there may be other options. If your phone is running correctly, it might be safer. At this point we do not even know for sure what will happen with any OTA's.

You should be ok then with just applications like that to try and copy them over with your favorite root explorer/file manager program, and set permissions. I have not checked to see what the permissions are in system for these type of files, but you should be able to check other programs and make the new ones match.

As to the SBF, it would surprise me if at some point one does not turn up, but you have to keep in mind that the SBF's are leaks from moto/vzw employees, and come leaked at great risk to the leakee. The tricky part is to make sure any sbf is actually what is either on the phone now, or what will be pushed OTA. The D3 folks had some intermediate SBF's leakes that caused a lot of confusion.

All of the apps which I removed (except for one) were just the .apk file, no .odex file. Those apps installed just fine after using Root Explorer to move them to /system/app.

The last app is VzwDeviceSetup.apk and has .apk file and .odex file. I have the .odex file already in /system/app (it was not deleted when the app was uninstalled). When I try to install the app in Root Explorer it fails, and if I try from adb (adb install r- [path of VzwDeviceSetup.apk]) it fails as well giving the message "Failure [INSTALL_FAILED_DEXPOT]"

Am I correct in assuming I'm having trouble with this app because there's an .odex file associated with it?
Any ideas on how to get this app installed?

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